Skip to main content

James McMurtry - 60 Acres

In the Carolinas, African American musicians around the first decade of the twentieth century developed a style of music known as the Piedmont blues. An important form of traditional music in North Carolina, the Piedmont blues is characterized by a guitar style that contains a distinct bass line played on the lower strings of the guitar as well as a melody picked on the higher strings. The bouncy, fingerpicked guitar style of Piedmont blues distinguishes it from Delta blues, which is often slow and mournful. Vocals, often paralleled by the melody played on the guitar, tell about the triumphs and trials of everyday life, such as work, love, heartbreak, loneliness, and the pitfalls of drinking and other overindulgences.

Within the Piedmont blues tradition, women developed a distinctive sound, and many of the best exponents of this tradition were North Carolinians, including Etta Baker of Morganton, Alga Mae Hinton of Johnston County, and Elizabeth Cotten of Carrboro. Cotten's inimitable picking style and heartbreaking vocals... evoked the hard life shared by many southern, rural African Americans.

The blues continue to thrive in North Carolina. The rise of the Chicago blues, which featured electrified instruments, led to the formation of full blues bands by the 1950s, and eventually these influences migrated to the state... The Durham Blues Festival, one of the first blues festivals held in the South, began in 1973 and features nationally recognized blues acts. Raleigh... and Greensboro all offer steady diets of local performers and blues societies for aficionados.


James McMurtry - 60 Acres
  • Written by: James McMurtry
  • Genre: Pop/Rock, Country
  • Release on: March 23, 2004

"James McMurtry earned his highest Billboard 200 chart position in 2008 and notched Americana Music Award nominations. He won the Americana Music Association’s Album of the Year, with We Can’t Make It Here named the organization’s Song of the Year."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Psychotic Reactions - Skip To My Lou

It expresses the emotions of angst, anger, and lust in some of the only ways that are accepted by society. The history of this edgy music genre dates back to the 1950s. It was formed by a combination of the blues, gospel music, and country. Throughout the decades, rock ‘n roll has evolved and become famous for being the genre that’s continued to push the boundaries of music, and, sometimes, the cultural boundaries of society itself. In the 1950s rock ‘n roll could be defined as rhythm and blues. In the 1960s it was partial to new musical styles such as folk rock and soul. And in the 1970s hard rock was born. From the 1980s to the present, technology has had an enormous impact on the music industry. Good taste is the enemy of the revolution. This remark epitomizes the spirit of rock ‘n roll. You’re not expected to conform, you’re expected to be yourself… no matter what anyone thinks. You are admired deeply for expressing emotions such as anger, heartbreak, and sadness through music in a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Pat Moran Quartet - Come Rain Or Come Shine

The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid to late 20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it, young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins. Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz degree grads were Black women. The education is the anchor... We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists. Source: Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment? by Giovanni Russonello The Pat Moran Q...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kenny Dorham - Like Someone In Love Take 2

In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable as white audiences began listening to blues. Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of great female classic blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. The first copyrighted song was in 1912, the Dallas Blues. As huge numbers of African Americans left the South at this time due to failed Reconstruction, dismal economic conditions, oppression in the South and the hope of better treatment in the North between 1915 and 1940s, the blues went with them, and settled in the urban centers of the North, especially Chicago. A more urban, electric blues developed as a result, which eclipsed the rural blues of the South and eventually became both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues. Blues fell somewhat out of popular favor until the l...
Post a Comment
Read more